This is going to be one of this blog’s recurring themes, actually. Because if you’re asking yourself that question, you’d be where I am, fifteen years or so after first beginning to work back through the big names of sixties and seventies singer-songwriterdom. I’m not putting myself forward as any kind of expert in these matters, by the way. I’m just stumbling around in the dark and sharing some of what I blunder into.

A year or so back, shortly before my hospitalisation and diagnosis, I came across mentions of Cyrus Faryar’s solo records on the internet. Not being a Modern Folk Quartet fan, Iranian-American Faryar was previously known to me as a Fred Neil sideman, a dude who played guitar on Fred Neil and Sessions and whose other work was therefore automatically of interest to me. So I downloaded a couple of tracks, one off each of his two records, Cyrus and Islands, to see what Cyrus did on his own.

He didn’t actually move very far from that sound: his is a more pop-minded and carefully arranged take on Neil’s 12-string folk-jazzery, but the similarities are clear. Faryar has a strong, light baritone, not as deep and rich as Neil’s, perhaps more agile and more adaptable, but without as much of that unmistakable charisma. Maybe I wouldn’t have thought so if I hadn’t heard Neil first, but when Faryar hits that low note on the word ‘depart’, it’s impossible not to think of Neil and the many occasions he pulled off the same trick. It’s a good trick, though: if I had the kind of voice to pull it off, I’d do it too.

Perhaps it’s unfair to keep working the Fred Neil angle here (maybe there are elements to Faryar’s music that he inherited from the MFQ, but having only heard their Phil Spector record, I can’t claim familiarity with their real sound – to me, I’m afraid, Henry Diltz is a photographer and Jerry Yester is Tim Buckley’s producer) – but perhaps if he hadn’t slipped into semi-retirement after Sessions, Neil might have taken his music down a similar road to this: drums, (that is, slightly bigger rock drums than those present on Fred Neil), tabla (Colin Walcott?), double bass, organ, strings, woodwinds, choirs – it’s a great sound.

Softly Through the Darkness is a really fine song, too. It is a slow-burner; it begins the album Cyrus (1971), and it feels like it was specifically written to start a record, taking four minutes to unwind and slowly build to its full arrangement, resolving on a wordless chorus of massed voices. Unfortunately on the album it’s immediately undercut by a pretty terrible version of Randy Newman’s I Think He’s Hiding, taken too fast, stomping inelegantly over the tempo and feel changes of the original and with a vocal conveying none of the subtle mockery of Newman’s performance. I understand why a singer might have wanted to take on a song like this, but someone should have nixed it early in the session and suggested he do I Think It’s Going to Rain Today instead.

So Cyrus (the album) isn’t a classic; there’s a couple too many missteps. But there’s four or five strong songs on it (follow-up Islands, produced by John Simon, has a mighty-good version of Neil classic The Dolphins, too) with Darkness being the pick of them, and anyone interested in Fred Neil or this kind of music should check the Faryar’s solo work out – Fred Neil original recordings are, after all, in distressingly short supply.